brotherhood

Steve MacLallan spent a lot of time in research what had happened to his brother Iain Alexander „hoodie“ MacLallan who left the family at the age of 14 to start an education as a cook in Scotland (strange idea in a country that was culinary spoken only famous for things like porridge or haggis). It was mostly to get away from beeing beaten four or five times a day by his mother.

The cooking career of Iain ended abruptly because of his experiments to develop a vegan haggis which was not appreciated by his teacher.

(Vegan cousine wasn’t very popular at that time. The vegan society was originally founded by Elsi Shrigley and Donald Watson in England as union of milkfree vegetarians. In Scotland it was mostly seen as agression against scottish lifestyle because it was british. Complicating on top was the fact most vegans were antialcoholics. Not a very popular point of view in Scotland.

Nevertheless the concept of vegan food was launched years later with high investment in marketing by the food industry. It was the attempt to make inedible things sellable to consumers. Considering these facts you can see the experiments of Iain Alexander MacLallan as first revolutionary steps in his life. And as a proof for his problem of being too early with his ideas.)

As it often happens to revolutionary ideas the reaction of the world was not ideal. His teacher, a cook, 6,5 feet tall and 140 kilograms of weight, threw a pan after him to show his disappointment. And Iain decided to split.

He moved to Austria because he thought from all he had heard about it they had higher diplomatic standards than Scotland. And they had mountains too and spoke like the scottish english a german noone could understand. Seemed to be pretty familiar.

In Vienna he entered a hip advertising agency called „Schneller, Schlechter“ of the owners Jan Schneller & Franz Schlechter. In short time he made a career because he stayed in the agency most of the time (the rest of the employees stayed mostly in the Kaffeehaus like normal in Vienna). Iain had no flat, so he lived in the agency.

His second advantage was he could spell „artdirector“ correctly. No wonder he became creative director after 2 weeks.

One of his creative ideas nearly killed the agency and one of the bigger press products in Austria. He developed a coupon announcement with an applicated pork rind for the agency’s client Gilette. (which was in fact quite successful with a return rate of 76%. But the local Gilette office in Vienna didn’t know where to store all the pork rinds because of it’s spacial limitations. And these rinds started to stink dreadful immediately because it was summer.) So he had to leave again – not only the agency but the country and headed to northern Germany. He ended in a boarding school in Schleswig Holstein just to bring some distance between Vienna and him. He thought it could be good to have some more education. And he liked the food in the mensa which was terrible for normal human beeings.

What Steve found out about the further path of life of his brother will be published here in the future.